January sees deal activity start strongly out of the blocks

It feels like every day so far in 2018 we have seen the announcement of one major deal or another. There doesn’t seem to be any particular industry bias, but geographically it would appear that the US is driving activity in terms of where the targets have been located. However, there have also been a couple of sizeable deals involving European companies announced. Having come off the back of 2017, which was not spectacular in terms of global activity when compared with 2016 and 2015, we are only one month into 2018 and already it would appear that last year is but a dim and distant memory and that excitement is building as to what “might be” in 2018.

Some of the companies that have made the news as being involved in deals in the last four weeks are long established industry stalwarts; Thomson Reuters is in talks to sell its financial and risk business to Blackstone and Singapore’s GIC Sovereign Wealth fund for USD 17bn. In addition, Dr Pepper Snapple Group is subject to a USD 18.7bn takeover by Keurig Green Mountain, while Fujifilm’s potential USD 6bn acquisition of Xerox has also attracted attention.

The month has seen nine deals greater than USD 5bn announced. These nine deals have a combined value of USD 93.3bn, making January 2018 the third-most valuable opening month on record, behind 2007 and 2015, and we all know those two years turned out to be record breaking years. Still, we are only 1/12th of the way through the year and a lot can happen between now and 31st December.

Zephyr director Lisa Wright shares her analysis and opinion on news and trends in M&A, private equity, venture capital and IPOs. Lisa’s insight and experience comes from 15 years of working with products that track deal activity.